Wanted to avoid having to have one of these hanging off the back of my A500.

I wouldn’t really call this an upgrade as such, more taking advantage of the latest developments in the Amiga scene. In case you’ve never heard of it, the ‘Gotek’ drive is basically a 3.5″ Floppy Drive emulator. Instead of putting floppy disks in it you plug in a USB flash drive that can contain up to a thousands Amiga Disk Files or ‘ADF’s’ (floppy disk images).

There are quite a few versions of these floating around on eBay, internal and external. I decided pretty early on that I wanted mine external so I could keep my A500’s DF0 as a real floppy drive so I opted for an external drive. I wanted to have the install look as authentic and neat as possible so I opted to install my Gotek inside an old external floppy disk drive that I picked up off eBay for spares/repairs. If you want to do the same just be careful to pick one that houses a regular sized floppy drive and not a reduced height, slim one as the Gotek won’t fit. You can see what I mean from the photo below which shows my finished Gotek drive underneath a couple of Roctec slim drives – it should be pretty obvious that the slim drives don’t have the necessary height to accommodate the Gotek drive.

The other choices available now include the option to have an OLED screen that can display the name of the ADF file you select and the track info and also a built in speaker that can simulate the noises of the real thing. It’s more of a buzzer than anything else but it’s pretty effective and much better than sitting in silence waiting for Cannon Fodder to load!

This time it’s the legendary Mini Cooper in proper British Racing green. This was a fun build and a bit simpler than the Ferrari I built a while back. I think the brick count was a fair bit lower too. My parents had a Mini when I was a child and I have a lot of fond memories of various days out and holidays that revolved around a family of 4 squeezing into such a little car. Building this model brought a lot of those memories back. I’m delighted with the finished product, it features opening doors, reclining seats with adjustable headrests, opening bonnet with engine bay and a boot that reveals a removable picnic basket and blanket! Highly recommended to both Lego collectors and anyone who just wants a pretty cool model Mini to display.

Queuing up at my local Game store for my Xbox One ‘Day One Edition’ Forza bundle. Not buying much else though, just an extra gamepad and a years Xbox Live subscription. Plan is to start downloading my games as soon as I get home…